we need you help

[tippie53]

I have been owner of this forum for about 20 years. John Read has been doing most of the day to day work
and Diane Kaufmann is also a help.
we need some volunteers to help take this into the future. I am getting old and its time to look into what can be done to keep this on trak.
we never charged a dime for membership.

John Read can tell you what we are looking for.

I would like to see 2 admins to help

we may need to ask for donations to help defray operation cost but we managed to keep that to a minimum.

So please help with your forum . I was a honor to take this over from the Bill Cory beginning and he is to me commended to starting this. The information shared here is a help to all

again thanks.
John Hall Tippie

[phavriluk]

John, I wish you well. I hope that the forum receives the support it needs. I'm in no position to help (my last birthday started with an '8') but I sure appreciate the exchanges we've been having. Luthiers' forums are an endangered species.

[bftobin]

I'm willing to help in any way I can, but I'm somewhat limited. John let me know me know what you need. I'm home most days ( I'm 71 and disabled) so lots of time most days.
Brent

[tippie53]

thanks
we want to keep this information available

[jread]

Hello all. It is an honor to help keep this forum running. The information stored here is a national treasure and it's all due to our active members. I truly have learned everything I know about building guitars from the good people involved with this forum from the Bill Corey books to all the posts, and especially Diane's thoughtful and careful notes and friendship. You all are amazing, talented, and interesting people. We have a lot of daily, unique visitors. It is difficult to get started in lutherie and a lot of people find a lot of inspiration here.

In short, Diane and I are the technical admins on the site. I focus on the server side while Diane handles all the new user requests and we both moderate for spammers. John Hall owns the site and funds everything. Thank you, John!

It is important to all of us that this site keeps going for the long term. What John is asking is here is that someone volunteer to step up and work with me to learn and care for the server-side software so that we can have a larger team keeping this thing going just in case one of us has to step away for any reason or is no longer around. I'm sure Diane might like a break with handling the new users. They come in several per day sometimes and she contacts each one to ensure they aren't bots or spammers of which there are many. Thanks to her careful work, you may notice that we don't have a problem with spam or inappropriate posts.

Here's some details. Feel free to PM me if you are interested getting involved:

Site is based on a hosted Linux server and runs PHPBB bulletin board software and a database. The host account is owned by our previous board admin who is no longer involved. I plan to migrate the site to a new provider and have a plan for that and am looking for a couple of people with interest and the ability to learn. It's not hard, we can do this together. I use AWS and think we can migrate it there easily but am willing to hear alternatives if someone has skills or interest in other platforms.

Thanks!

John Read